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*Official* England in NZ 2023

Daemon

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Won’t be a cakewalk tomorrow (well, tonight from my POV) but I’d back us to get there. It’d be nice if they could hit the runs super quick so I can watch it happening but I suppose that’s an unreasonable request.
Yes, very unreasonable ask of this side to score quickly
 

GIMH

Norwood's on Fire
And the wicket that's gone down is largely irrelant.....
Had a bad nights sleep last night so might as well have stayed up and watched. Anyway I checked the score intermittently through my struggles to get back to sleep and it never seemed good. I was delighted to see us batting at all by the time my alarm went up, and seeing we were one down immediately caused me to check it was Crawley and then go ‘ok fine.’ Sad state of affairs really. Perhaps now the thinking will be there’s no point adding anyone else to open and instead we wait for Bairstow.
 

SteveNZ

Cricketer Of The Year
To only highlight Macewell is wrong, I knew Stuff would be licking their fingers at the dismissal. The headline "Bracewell's calamitous error hinders Black Cap's fightback" isn't fair. There were others too that threw away their wickets. One guy can't lose a game.

That said it seems to have affected Bracewell plenty. His bowling today just wasn't good. Hope he recovers quickly and bowls a good spell tomorrow. This is the challenge in international cricket, every day feels different. Many thought Kane didn't have it in him two days ago and today he's on top of the world. He's level headed and wouldn't quite get to him but Bracewell is different. He hasn't had a lot of success at domestic level and isn't used to the limelight good or bad so will need to figure how to handle it and turn it around quickly. He's quite a nice bloke, fairly level headed but it's not easy to handle oscillating fortunes on a daily basis.
I think it's fair. It was a calamitous error, and it did hinder our fightback. Is that a big moment in the game? To me, yeah it is. 478-6, lead of 250, with a guy set on 80 odd and Bracewell who is in this side as an all-rounder. You're looking at 300+ in that scenario, all Bracewell needs to contribute is a 20 odd, get Blundell through to three figures, and if the new ball is taken, he's a batsman capable of playing it. But he has one of hell of a brain melt, and we're all out 5 runs later.

I'm not of the opinion of others that it was important/handy to bowl at England tonight. England are/were going to go at any total, 300+ in a day or just less was necessary, especially with our lack of depth of bowling. We did such a great job to 6 down then royally ****ed it up.
 

Brook's side

International Regular
To be fair to Crawley, he did manage to get the one ball which moved off the seam. It's not like there was any hint leading up to that it could happen.
I THINK ZAK CRAWLEY SHOULD PLAY EVERY GAME FOR ENGLAND UNTIL HE DIES


RATIONAL MIDDLE GROUND



I THINK ZAK CRAWLEY IS TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING BAD IN THE WORLD
 

Molehill

International Captain
I fully understand why Crawley gets the grief he does, but why does Pope manage to avoid it? He's spent half his Test career at the somewhat easier number 6 yet still averages only 33 (only 5 more than Crawley). Why is he not a potential victim of Bairstow's return?
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
I fully understand why Crawley gets the grief he does, but why does Pope manage to avoid it? He's spent half his Test career at the somewhat easier number 6 yet still averages only 33 (only 5 more than Crawley). Why is he not a potential victim of Bairstow's return?
Because he's averaged 40+ over 11 and a half tests since moving up to number 3; a position where only Root has been any good since Trott called it a day, and Root prefers to bat at 4. Yes, he is a potential victim when YJB returns, but not a very likely one. Ultimately it makes more sense to try and fix the part of the team that is broken rather than one of the parts that isn't.
 

Nintendo

Cricketer Of The Year
I fully understand why Crawley gets the grief he does, but why does Pope manage to avoid it? He's spent half his Test career at the somewhat easier number 6 yet still averages only 33 (only 5 more than Crawley). Why is he not a potential victim of Bairstow's return?
Just to add on to what david said, pope also actually has fc runs, unlike crawley. Since his county debut he had the best county average of anyone not named sangakarra who had far less innings, and is, ya know, sangakarra. Crawley's kent opening partner, ben compton, made as many fc centuries in half a season as crawley has across his career last year.
 

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